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Instant, in-software, translation is an amazing way to learn languages and I can't congratulate the author enough on his implementation. The Guild Wars MMO ha

Instant, in-software, translation is an amazing way to learn languages and I can't congratulate the author enough on his implementation. The Guild Wars MMO had a similar functionality built-in that allowed the player to press Ctrl to show the whole U.I in another language. When letting go it'd go back to the primary language. Don't know why they implemented that but it got me 80% of the way to fluency in English. I implemented something similar for the Kindle Reader and I use it often to learn Japanese and Korean. If people have other examples of software with this functionality I'd love to hear about them.

SuoDuanDao 7y ago
Wow, I used to play guild wars! Cool to hear they were so ahead of their time!
viewer5 7y ago
Monster Hunter 4U (and possibly others) has triggered shoutouts (e.g., paraphrasing, "I'm jumping on the monster!" when you jump on the monster, "Oh no, I've been knocked out" when you get knocked out, etc) that show up in each player's own language. Final Fantasy 14 has a series of dropdown chat menus, and handy tab-completion, that let you say words/vocab (like "White Mage") or phrases ("Let's queue for a dungeon!") that show up in players' own languages
lnanek2 7y ago
> I implemented something similar for the Kindle Reader Hey, that's awesome, do you have a github repo for the Kindle Reader change/companion app? I learn Chinese using Kindle and the native app experience for that is really terrible. I have to highlight lines I don't understand which takes a long press and selecting the start and end, copy them, then Google Translate pops up. After enough lines are copied, Kindle refuses to let you highlight more, so then I have to long press again and delete the line to avoid hitting that limit. Long press to see translation would be so much faster. I wish it was like desktop software where there's plenty of browser plugins to show you translations on mouse hover.
jwong_ 7y ago
Do you have any notes or have you shared the implementation for Kindle Reader? I've been looking for similar things to pick up "UI"-fluency in other languages.
EE84M3i 7y ago
I wonder if this might have been a feature for testing that they figured "hey, why not expose to the end user?" Testers need to test text rendering/dimensions in different languages, but likely don't speak all of them, so they could navigate the menus in their native language and then switch to the language under test when they got to the right place.
wahnfrieden 7y ago
For Japanese, I built a popular iOS app called Manabi Reader that has easy access to short-form native Japanese reading material and has one-gap access to seeing the English. https://reader.manabi.io https://reader.manabi.io

SuoDuanDao 7y ago

Wow, I used to play guild wars! Cool to hear they were so ahead of their time!

viewer5 7y ago

Monster Hunter 4U (and possibly others) has triggered shoutouts (e.g., paraphrasing, "I'm jumping on the monster!" when you jump on the monster, "Oh no, I've been knocked out" when you get knocked out, etc) that show up in each player's own language. Final Fantasy 14 has a series of dropdown chat menus, and handy tab-completion, that let you say words/vocab (like "White Mage") or phrases ("Let's queue for a dungeon!") that show up in players' own languages

lnanek2 7y ago

> I implemented something similar for the Kindle Reader Hey, that's awesome, do you have a github repo for the Kindle Reader change/companion app? I learn Chinese using Kindle and the native app experience for that is really terrible. I have to highlight lines I don't understand which takes a long press and selecting the start and end, copy them, then Google Translate pops up. After enough lines are copied, Kindle refuses to let you highlight more, so then I have to long press again and delete the line to avoid hitting that limit. Long press to see translation would be so much faster. I wish it was like desktop software where there's plenty of browser plugins to show you translations on mouse hover.

jwong_ 7y ago

Do you have any notes or have you shared the implementation for Kindle Reader? I've been looking for similar things to pick up "UI"-fluency in other languages.

EE84M3i 7y ago

I wonder if this might have been a feature for testing that they figured "hey, why not expose to the end user?" Testers need to test text rendering/dimensions in different languages, but likely don't speak all of them, so they could navigate the menus in their native language and then switch to the language under test when they got to the right place.

wahnfrieden 7y ago

For Japanese, I built a popular iOS app called Manabi Reader that has easy access to short-form native Japanese reading material and has one-gap access to seeing the English. https://reader.manabi.io https://reader.manabi.io